Fresh eyes on Swedish backpacker case

Saturday, 29 April 2023

The intentions book at Crosbies Hut has the dubious honour of being a ledger of foreign tourists’ sleepless nights. You can’t leaf through the amateur weather reports and brief observations about track side flora and fauna without stumbling across an entry like this: “maybe don’t mention the murder story in the history. Didn’t sleep,” writes one Israeli visitor.

The murder they’re referring to is the 1989 disappearance of Swedish backpacker couple Heidi Paakkonen​, 21, and Urban Höglin​, 23.

The case that has become a staple of New Zealand criminal lore and led to the successful conviction of David Tamihere​ was marred by the use of an incentivised secret witness who was later found to be perjurious.

But the attempt to find out what happened to the couple is no less clear than the day David Tamihere was sentenced.

Jailed for 21 years, Tamihere was convicted of the killings based partly on evidence that was to be later contradicted by the discovery of Höglin’s body.

The search for the pair, one of the largest in New Zealand history saw the army, police and volunteers comb the hills inland from Thames. So comprehensive was ‘Operation Stockholm’, the army helicoptered in satellite television sets so that soldiers looking for the pair could view rugby matches from the search camp.

While most Kiwis will be familiar with the case, in the couple’s home country of Sweden it’s a different story. Although Swedes are aware of the case it remains to many a recondite horror story set in the antipodean hills of the Coromandel range.

Love Lyssarides​ didn’t move his partner and ten-month-old to New Zealand to solve the case or exonerate anybody. He’s here to tell a story. As meticulously as possible.

The 28-year-old investigative journalist who is in the process of writing and a recording a podcast in Swedish about the case for Stockholm based Third Ear Studio, says it was essential his family join him in New Zealand.

“It was a necessity that I came here. I knew I wanted to do this story. I wouldn’t be able to leave them in Stockholm,” he explains with his unmistakably Swedish lilt.

He and his partner Emma discuss the case so much that Lyssarides frets his daughter’s first words might be “Tamihere. Or Mama, papa, Tamihere.”

The 28-year-old Swedish journalist who cuts an almost fisherman like figure, all rolled beanie and nicotine gum – a replacement for the snus​ he normally slips under his lip at home – has spent the last two months traversing the country in search of people who met the pair on their journey around New Zealand.

On the day we meet, Lyssarides has just stepped off a domestic turboprop from Wellington, his home base while in New Zealand.

Hauling his bright blue backpack off the luggage conveyor at Hamilton airport, Lyssarides’ excitement for the case hasn’t yet dulled.

He explains that Crosbies Clearing, as it was known when the pair went missing, is of paramount importance to the case at hand. It is a timestamp, a setting and a bookend all laid out over a well trodden and creased clearing high atop the Coromandel Range.

“This is where John Cassidy​ remembered he had seen a man and a woman sitting there. The man was pitching a tent and the woman was silent. He thought it was kind of odd. So then he hears about it on the news that the two Swedes are missing and thinks maybe this would be an interesting bit of information for the police.”

Little did Cassidy, a long serving search and rescue volunteer know at the time, but this final sighting would give the police a description of a man they would later allege was David Tamihere.

After traipsing through the Coromandel bush, which Lyssarides says is less redolent of his homeland and more the Moomin Valley​, Lyssarides sits cross-legged in a hunting and fishing fleece at the stainless steel table inside the ten bunk hut.

In front of him, countless manilla folders laden with testimonies, statements and notes tell a splintered story of the disappearance.

On the day we hiked to Crosbies Hut together his pack weighed 18 kgs. Full of recording equipment, reams of case files and his laptop, Lyssarides doesn’t do much in half measures.

Out of one of the folders comes a photocopy of Cassidy’s meticulously maintained tramping diary.

“At 15:12, arrived at the pines area at Crosbies settlement. That would be someone you could trust,” Lyssarides says might have been the police’s assessment of Cassidy.

Although on the face of it Cassidy has no reason to lie, Lyssarides says he only provides a tacit indication the unusual couple at the clearing were Paakkonen and Tamihere.

Cassidy in fact only successfully identified him after controversial detective John Hughes, who led the case, asked him to identify Tamihere as he was lead in cuffs to the Thames courthouse. This, despite failing to recognise him in a previous police montage.

Cassidy would never successfully identify the woman as Paakkonen either.

The thing about the case of Heidi and Urban is that very few people are in absolute agreement about what happened to the couple on the eighth of April 34-years-ago. Lyssarides included.

He illustrates by reaching for a topo map, one that illustrates the contours and undulation of the Thames uplands on a deceiving flat plane.

On it Lyssarides points to a car park.

“He says he stole the car here [at the end of Victoria St]. David Tamihere claims he stole their car. He did not murder them he just stole their car … His story is that he walked up Tararu Creek Rd, which is today called Victoria St​. They parked their white Subaru there. No other cars were passing him. He saw the car and thought ‘this is a great car, I’m going to steal their car.”

This episode is crucial, Lyssarides says, in establishing a timeline of events which begins with the couple setting off up the track, and potentially ends with the sighting of a woman resembling Heidi Paakkonen at the clearing by Cassidy.

“What would a car thief do? A car thief would make sure the owners are not going to come back … Checking the temperature of the tail pipe, that was kind of his way of checking that they just left. They are probably going to be away for a couple of days. I have a lot of time to steal their car.”

In a statement he provided to police, Tamihere says he used a piece of number eight wire to open the car’s window. Initially, police didn’t believe that it was possible to open that model of car with a simple thief’s trick – he showed them otherwise in a demonstration.

Tamihere would have had to have been a very fast walker in order to make that story stack up, the police at the time claimed.

Testing carried out to establish how long it would take from a baseline temperature for the subaru’s exhaust pipe to cool down and a window of time to open for Tamihere to walk up Victoria St and nick the couple’s car would have only been about 30minutes.

Lyssarides, is so well versed in the details of the case, he knows that to get from where the houses stop to the end of Victoria St, takes more than half-an-hour.

How?

He ran it.

On a humid Thames day, Lyssarides laced up his trainers and ran as fast as he could up the steep winding road into the Coromandel bush.

“I wanted to see if it was humanly possible to run it in under thirty minutes.”

How long did it take him? “38 minutes,” he says.

Getting to know Lyssarides, it becomes clear that he isn’t wedded to a single version of events. Even when concluding about the timing of his run he remains open-minded. Perhaps they left the car running to listen to a few tunes while they prepared their gear. Maybe it was a matter of Tamihere not telling the truth. Nobody can know for sure.

The way in which as a storyteller you hold a great deal of responsibility for your audience’s conceptualisation of a setting isn’t lost on Lyssarides either.

Citing the infamous case of Claas Relotius​, a German feature writer at Der Spiegel ​who fabricated stories about middle America amongst other things, Lyssarides says he is circumspect when it comes to portraying a country a world away from Swedish listeners.

“Coming here as a foreigner, telling this story to a Swedish audience I realise that I have quite a lot of power because nobody knows that much about the Coromandel. I could start off the story by saying ‘when you come into town you pass the Red Fox Tavern, the site of a violent shooting’ and that would make the Swedish audience think, whoa it is a sketchy place. Or I could start off the story saying how friendly everyone is. The power of narrative is just so strong.”

Not only is he at the mercy of the vagaries of narrative, so too are those he will feature in his podcast.

Returning to Thames from Crosbies Hut, Lyssarides pays a visit at the flat of Marilyn Round, just off Thames’ main street. Round was likely the last person to see the two Swedes alive. She cut their hair.

As she describes the pair with a delicate diffidence it’s clear time has diluted her memory of the couple. Their Nordic good looks and a yenning for home, Round remembers well, she even recalls that they visited her salon on a Friday - the day she had her apprentice in.

But when her daughter, who is also present as Lyssarides’ interviews Round, prompts her to recall her feelings in court as she glanced from the witness stand to the dock where Tamihere sat saying: “you said he was a bastard, don’t you remember?”, Round isn’t so sure.

This plasticity of memory is something Lyssarides is keenly aware of.

Lyssarides says that for Swedes his podcast will be an opportunity to get to grips with the sometimes murky details of the case.

It might surprise Kiwis to know that in Sweden the case is being scrutinised beyond its entertainment potential.

The land of social democracy, Volvos and Vikings, has seen a pernicious uptick in violent gun crime spurred by feuding criminal gangs and fuelled in part by a steady supply of weapons that slipped out of the Balkans during the messy dissolution of Yugoslavia. The Nordic nation is the only European country to register an increase in fatal shootings, according to reporting by The Guardian, overtaking Italy and eastern European countries against the same metric.

In a move to convict more suspects in cases where a code of silence is often maintained by the accused and their supporters, the Swedish government, in confidence and supply with the populist Sweden Democrats are considering resurrecting the use of anonymous witnesses at trial.

“We have a new government in Sweden, the Swedish democrats are in supply and confidence and a big political force in Sweden right now. People who know more about this than I do, say that the policies against crime are a copy-paste from the Sweden Democrats’ manifesto. The underlying thing is we are going to be tougher on crime.

“One of the things they want to implement is to have anonymous witness testimonies in court. So that has become a big political question in Stockholm. I think this case would be kind of interesting to talk about because it kind of has to do with that, and basically it’s quite a scary thing, to sit in a courtroom and have someone accuse you of something.”

In Tamihere’s case, he would have seen Secret Witness C, later revealed to be Roberto Conchie Harris​, sitting across from him in the dock, it was the public who were in the dark. Under the Swedish proposal, even that modicum of transparency would’ve vanished.

“I think the Swedish audience would be interested to hear that… I think the secret witness thing is quite different, the bottom line here is that the fact of the use of incentives.”

Granted the royal prerogative of mercy in 2020 by then Governor General Dame Patsy Reddy, Tamihere has exercised his right to refer the case back to the court of appeal in a bid to have his conviction quashed. With an appeal date slated for November, Paakkonen and Höglin’s names will again be on the lips of Kiwis.

Lyssarides says that beyond the tragedy of their disappearance and the aching lack of closure for their families, the case is a telling reminder that sometimes even in the seemingly most welcoming countries, the apparatus of accountability, the courts, the police, fails.

“New Zealand people in general are so hospitable, so welcoming, and I think that’s a really important part of the New Zealand identity, right? There’s something about that identity that was a bit shattered by it [the case]… One of the really sad things about the Arthur Allan Thomas case where the police planted things, and this case where the police did some questionable things, the worst consequence is that people are going to lose faith in the authorities. That could have some pretty serious consequences.”